Our plans for Rockstor

User Stories
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At our company, storage is a struggle.
Projects we deal with, generally take up between 7 to 20 TB each.
So a lot of our IT budget is spent on storage for projects.
This leaves us with almost no budget for storage for our internal needs.
Luckily, due to replacing an old system, we now have 8 rack server chassis at our disposal to play around with.
Each of those chassis have 16 3.5" disk trays. So perfect to build some cheap storage.
I removed everything, except the backplane and power supply.
In the old system, these machines where used as a rendering and storage farm., interconnected with 10Gb (CX4)
We will probably reuse these as well.

I am now test driving Rockstor on the first server I have rebuilt and all looks good.
2 RAID cards provide 4 RAID5 volumes from 16 6TB disks, giving us 18TB per volume
We have integrated the first Rockstor setup in our environment, (Samba4 Active Directory )
Planned use:

  • ownCloud for general document use
    (Easier and more flexible for less technical people)
  • SMB for purposes where ownCloud is not a viable option.
  • NFS for specific applications
  • AFP for time machine backups of our OSX workstations

I d like to be able have iSCSI as well, but that’s maybe for the future :relaxed:

Some of the shares will be replicated to another Rockstor appliance for safety

Like with all our systems, we enforced 2 factor authentication on ssh/sudo/su via pam, radius and linotp
I wonder if it would be possible to have 2 factor auth on the web GUI as well :smile:

1 Like
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Thanks for sharing your story @koendb!

some users have reported issues with ownCloud and we plan to address them in the next(3.8-10) release. ownCloud is something we use here at Rockstor also. I understand that because of docker and owncloud updates, users may be running into issues. But we plan to address these soon.

You could use SMB as an external storage inside ownCloud. I really like this feature, give it a try if you haven’t already.

for time machine backups, make sure to check out http://rockstor.com/blog/tutorials/time-machine-backups-with-rockstor/ .

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@suman: I have decided to have a dedicated ownCloud installation, rather then to use a docker on a rockstor instance.
I like to keep duties segregated anyway.

SMB external storage is not working for us right now, I think, due to a kerberos spn issue ,but I havent managed to find the time to really dive into this.

I havent looked at time machine backups yet, but will test this today.